10-minute read, including photo captions

With the Air Force Thunderbirds and the Navy Blue Angels (among others) doing fly-overs of major cities to honor healthcare workers, first responders, and essential personnel who have put their lives at risk during this COVID-19 pandemic, it seemed appropriate for me to add my voice of solidarity and thanks for that hard-working segment of society by doing my own flyover.

In a manner of speaking.

I mean, I don’t have my own jaggle of jets (isn’t that what it’s called when you have an appreciable affinity for alliteration?), so I’m using OPP - Other People’s Planes!

The following are a series of photos from the Naval Air Station at Patuxent River, MD taken during the air show they hosted on June 2nd, 2018.

To be clear, I am not an aviation buff.

I couldn’t tell an F-Whatever from a Warthog (although I do know that the latter is both a plane and a wild pig : -)). Nor am I interested enough in the technical details to do the requisite research to sound like an “authority” in this post. So don’t expect enlightening, “insider notes” about the history and capabilities of the aircraft pictured below. Beyond telling the difference between a helicopter and a jet, I am pretty much utterly clueless, and happy to stay that way.

On the other hand, I am fascinated by aviation in general - especially high-performance jets. I hate to use hackneyed cliches (especially out-of -context political ones), but the “shock and awe” of a Blue Angels air show is something to be experienced before you can really appreciate that phrase. The sound (and the fury?) of a jet tearing a searing hole in the atmosphere as it streaks by at a couple hundred miles an hour is indescribable - so I won’t even try. I just wish they were allowed to break the sound barrier at these shows - I would love to see, hear, and feel a sonic boom close up.

I basically love all things that fly - even (or especially?) when they’re on the ground - from a purely photographic/compositional perspective. The symmetry, sleek (and sometimes repetitive) shapes, and the stark, contrasting lines of wings and cowlings trigger some deep neuroaesthetic algorithms in my brain.

That love of flying things extends pretty widely to kites, Frisbees, and toys like the X-Zylo Flying Gyroscope - I even have a collection of hand-crafted boomerangs (and yes, they do come back, when thrown properly in the right wind conditions).

We (my friend JA and I) were very lucky in terms of weather. The forecast called for afternoon thunderstorms, which very obligingly held off until minutes after the end of the show, when we were safely ensconced in the car. In fact, the impending storm put on a fantastic display of some of the best thunderheads (cumulonimbus clouds) I’ve ever seen. One massive cloud in particular, that bore down on us toward the end of the afternoon, merited its own portrait:

This event was also significant from the standpoint of the evolution of my post-processing skills.

Since I don’t have the long telephoto lenses and super-fast cameras that many air show photographers do, I felt like I wanted something else to help distinguish my images. I couldn’t show you the individual eyebrow-hairs of the Blue Angels pilot that streaked past, so while looking through this set of photos in post, I made several “artistic decisions”:

I would embrace the wide shots. I figured I’d crop a few frames to get some closer perspectives, but I would also “celebrate” the sweeping vistas of the smoke-trailing aerobats - something I didn’t see a lot of other photographers doing (except for in certain obvious circumstances)
I would gravitate toward high-contrast silhouettes - again something I didn’t see too many others doing (most others seemed at pains to produce sharp, “properly” exposed photos, not that there’s anything wrong with that)
I made two stylistic choices throughout the set: I “unlocked” the aspect ratios when cropping (so you’ll see some odd squares and rectangles), and I used the compositional technique of “negative space” more often than I had in the past (so you’ll see some planes on the edge of frames with “empty” space around them)
Finally, for the first time in my photographic life, I ventured into the realm of split-toning. At first, I experimented with the technique on the vintage propeller planes as a way to hearken back to the “olden days” of sepia and selenium toned prints, but then as I “warmed” to the effect, I tried it out with other subject matter. A new love was born, and I started using split toning more frequently after that.
- Although not always pointed out, there are examples of split toning used in my posts for the Shenandoah Fall Foliage, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, the Fredericksburg Photowalk, the Lonaconing Silk Mill, Baltimore Light City, and Georgetown Glow.

For those of you unfamiliar with split-toning, it’s a process whereby you replace - or, more accurately - infuse - the highlights and shadows of an image with two different colors. It can be used for color or B&W photos, and is generally applied to a very subtle extent, to slightly alter the mood or feel of a subject.

In the example below, I chose a yellowish-mustard color (close to sepia/brown) for the highlights and a steely-blue for the shadows.

You can see in the before-and-after screenshot below how the original color image was converted to high-contrast B&W (with deep shadows), and then how the split-toning was added.

Notice first of all how the highlights have taken on that yellow-mustard hue, and the shadows are now sort of steely-blue.
Notice secondly how the Balance slider in between the Highlights and Shadows sections shown on the right has been moved to the right by 38% (+38). That means that I have emphasized the highlights by that percentage, so the blue hue in the shadows will be less evident than the mustard hue will be in the highlights. The relative darkness of the shadows makes it even harder to detect the blue hue - that’s why you can see them better in the slightly brighter grass than in the deeper shadows.

The same technique - and hues - was used in the cloud photo above, where it may be more evident given the range of brightness values in that image.

With these points in mind, let’s review the photos I chose from the full set of 1,843 frames I shot that day….but before we get to that, here’s a quick video “highlights reel” to whet your appetite: